Pentacon CZ Jena Lenses Update

What else can one say? It’s fabulously sharp and has great colour contrast. As a 135mm, it sits somewhere between a normal prime lens and a full scale tele, so perhaps the one disadvantage is there’s no chance of carrying it mounted and being able to shut your camera case. It comes with its own extending lens hood, which is neat. It screams quality, but at an affordable price (like most M42 stuff nowadays). You can range out to 30 metres with this thing, but at the same time it’s not QUITE as heavy (or as long range, natch) as a bespoke tele lens. But it certainly makes some wildlife shots and some distance shots more practicable.

All in all a very impressive lens. I’ve also now begun to get a real feel for the 29mm Pentacon wide angle. In general I really like this lens now. A wide angle gives you basically a reproduction of what your eye sees. The Pentacon 29mm has decent colour reproduction but also a weird bokeh thing in close focus. Look at the tree immediately behind the branch in this photo-it looks like its being sucked down a wormhole. Personally I like the effect, the look and feel reminded me immediately of the atmosphere in ‘the Zone’ in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film ‘Stalker’, but this effect is also definitely quite wild, and not for fidelity purists.

In short-two great lenses, each of which do their own thing amazingly well! Though hefty, the 135 might be the best M42 mount lens in my collection now, and the 29mm, which is smaller than even a 50mm prime, is perfect for quick, light but high quality snapping on a small camera like the Exa.